Wednesday, October 17, 2012

Which is ostensibly why author David Shields has published a collection of the weird stuff Ichiro has said throughout his lengthy baseball career. The book, “Baseball Is Just Baseball: The Understated Ichiro,” was released Sept. 13 and is available both in analog (you know, as a book) and as an e-book.

Here are some excerpts from the first few pages of the book:

“During a game between the Mariners and A’s in Oakland, fans in the right-field bleachers taunted him with racial epithets and threw quarters and ice at him. A man who hit Ichiro in the head with a quarter stood and took a bow. Afterward, asked what happened, Ichiro said—according to the translator, Ted Heid—“Something came out of the stands and hit me.” Ichiro immediately said something to Heid, who said, “I must correct my previous interpretation. Ichiro said, ‘Something came out of the sky and hit me.’” Asked how much money he collected, Ichiro said, “I couldn’t tell if it was rain or money coming down.” Asked if something like this had ever happened to him in Japan, he said, “Of course it happened there. Any time you come in as a visiting team, things fall out of the sky. The gods once threw an aluminum can at me.”

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You want to talk about not funny...this morning I had to try to explain (and failed to do so) this knee-slapper from William the Conqueror to a class for first-years.

From William of Malmsebury's account of the battle of Hastings:

The duke, with serene countenance, declaring aloud that God would favour his as being the righteous side, called for his arms; and when, through the haste of his attendants, he had put on his hauberk the hind part before, he corrected the mistake with a laugh, saying "The power of my dukedom shall be turned into a kingdom."

We had a Japanese contingent to our company (in Milwaukee) recently. Decided to sign a baseball as a gift. Got one with the racing sausages* on it. Talk about a weird translation.

* we went on to tell the story of how one-time Brewer Hideo Nomo was so enamored with them that as a visiting player he later came back and sereptitiously ran as one of the sausages. At this point even the translator had given up.